My City Was Gone: One American Town's Toxic Secret, Its Angry Band of Locals, and a $700 Million Day in Court - Softcover

Love, Dennis

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9780060585518: My City Was Gone: One American Town's Toxic Secret, Its Angry Band of Locals, and a $700 Million Day in Court

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006058551X ISBN 13: 9780060585518

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2007

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Powerful and important, My City Was Gone is the cautionary tale of how a hardworking small town was destroyed by the very forces that created it. Anniston, Alabama, was once a thriving industrial hub, home to a Monsanto chemical plant as well as a federal depot for chemical weapons. Now its notoriety comes from its exceptionally high cancer rate—some 25 percent above the state norm—and the town's determined citizens who joined together and struck back at the corporation.

As provocative and timely as Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action, My City Was Gone is a magnificently told true story of ordinary citizens in a small Southern town who led a legendary fight against corporate pollution and wrongdoing.

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About the Author

Dennis Love began his writing career at the Anniston Star. He has also worked as a reporter for numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Daily News, Buzz, the Sacramento Bee, and the Arizona Republic. He has won the national prize for commentary from the American Association of Sunday Newspaper Editors as well as seven Associated Press News Writing awards and two Best of the West awards. The coauthor of the book Blind Faith, he lives in Sacramento, California.

From Publishers Weekly

Anniston, Ala., where decades of PCB contamination from a Monsanto chemical plant led to a massive lawsuit and a $700 million settlement—twice the celebrated "Erin Brockovich" payout—is also where journalist Love grew up. Love's retelling of this toxic tort saga—and an unrelated battle between environmentalists and the Pentagon over a plan to incinerate chemical weapons at a local army depot—also tries to outdo the movie Erin Brockovich in drama, flamboyant characterizations and feisty populism. Almost every participant in the tussle gets an overdrawn profile—"David Baker was back, baby"—and almost every development gets ominously foreshadowed ("there was something out there on the edge of town that had scared these Monsanto folks half to death"). Thrown in are lengthy musings on the town's history and troubled race relations—most of the Monsanto plaintiffs were from Anniston's poor, mostly black West Side—and the author's idyllic childhood there. The space given to extraneous human interest would have been better used filling out the author's sketchy, inadequate exposition of the science behind the competing environmental, medical and legal claims. (Aug. 15)
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